"Interactive cartoon": in the market of children's games, no one managed to build a business by accidentally releasing a hit

VGTRK has launched the Interactive Cartoon brand, under which it will produce children’s games based on its cartoon franchises. We talked with Alexey Ilyin, the head of children’s projects of the VGTRK gaming direction, about the brand and the industry.

Hi! Popular opinion – “children’s games do not bring money.” I heard this opinion three years ago, two years ago, and I heard it a couple of months ago. Is it so?

Alexey Ilyin

Hi! I would reformulate this statement a bit: “children’s games don’t make a lot of money quickly.” In this market, no one has managed to build a business by accidentally releasing a hit. Yes, in this formulation – it’s true. But there are companies like TocaBoca and SagoSago on the market. They have built a business and are making money on children’s apps by releasing high-quality products on the international market.

As for us, we are not chasing a quick profit. We want to build a brand – publishing and production – for many years to come.

By the way, why did you take up the development of such projects yourself?

4 years ago, my daughter was born. It became a very important event in my life. She grew up, and every day it became more and more interesting to communicate with her. And one day I thought, “I’m making games, and when will my daughter be able to play them? Apparently, in 15 years, well, maybe 12.” And I really wanted to make a children’s game so that she would be interested in playing it and so that I could play with her.

It was at this moment that I received an offer to lead the development and publication of interactive cartoons from VGTRK. I accepted it and am now taking part in the creation of the publishing brand “Interactive Cartoon“. The process takes place with the support of the TV channel “Mult”.

The TV channel is part of the Digital Television group. This is a joint venture between VGTRK and Rostelecom.

Why does a television giant need a high-risk market for children’s games?

Look, in general, a lot of attention is paid to the children’s direction in the holding. The holding includes not only the TV channel “Mult”. VGTRK also owns half of the children’s channel “Carousel”, there is a TV channel “Mama”, a number of Internet projects for children and parents are being created, a large number of animation products are being produced. The step into the field of applications and games is a logical continuation of the development of the children’s direction.

Children’s games and interactive applications will expand the audience of cartoons, attract a new audience and get additional monetization of both the audience of the holding and characters and brands.

Well, what does the brand “Interactive Cartoon” mean by itself? Is this a studio?

First of all, it is a publishing house and a production center.

In addition, we are creating our own studio – “Studio of interactive cartoons”. The first product of the studio has already been released – this is the game “Pieces of Paper”. In April 2016, another game project based on the animated series “Mi-Mi-Bears” will be released.

The studio has very ambitious plans for 2016. A number of games will be released.

“Pieces of paper”

How difficult is it at all today? What planned (and unplanned) difficulties did you encounter when launching the project?

Building something new from scratch is always a difficult task.

When I started working at the company, most of all I was afraid that I would face a bunch of bureaucratic approvals and extremely slow decision-making speed. But thanks to our curators inside the holding, many problems were avoided, and we received a fairly high degree of autonomy, which allowed us to work as a startup.

Most of our team has extensive experience in game development and publishing. But all these people have previously worked with mobile, social, PC or console games for a more adult audience. Children’s games, in turn, are a completely different world with its own rules and laws. I had to retrain.

Plus, the children’s market has been developing not so long ago, we have to do a lot “by touch”, by trial and error. Fortunately, many of our developers have children, which makes it easier to adapt to the new environment.

What specific tasks does VGTRK set for the “Interactive Cartoon”?

There are a lot of tasks being set:

• The first and most important thing is to create a line of high–quality products for the education, development and entertainment of children. Despite the fact that, at first glance, there are quite a lot of applications for children in stores, there are not so many high-quality and useful products among them. The situation is better in the Western market, but due to the high cost of localization (children’s games often contain a large amount of voice acting), the lack of recognition of some characters and a number of other factors, many interesting products do not enter our market.
• Maintaining and expanding the cartoon world of the holding. We want our products to help the child explore the world of the cartoon and learn about it what he did not see on the screen.
• And learn how to monetize this audience.

You mentioned earlier that “Interactive Cartoon” it works with the support of the channel “Cartoon”, by order of which cartoons are filmed. What kind of series?

By order of the Cartoon TV channel, the animation studio “Locomotive” makes the series “Papers”, “Mi-Mi-Bears”, “Magic Lantern”, “Arkady Locomotives”, several more new series and new franchises will appear before the end of the year.

“Arkady Parovozov”

Since we have touched on this non-gaming topic, then here is the question: what do we have now with the animated series market in the country? Again, I often hear that it’s a nightmare, but, on the other hand, we have “Masha and the Bear“, there is a “Mill“ that consistently produces almost two full-length films a year. How do you assess the state of this market yourself?

I would divide the market of full-length cartoons and the market of animated series.

It’s harder for me to talk about full-length films, because I have less contact with them. From the consumer’s point of view, the quality of the products seems to me quite low, and the number of products coming out (especially for the lower age category) is clearly insufficient. For example, last year I did not go to the cinema with my daughter to see any Russian cartoon, because neither she nor I were interested in any, while we were at several Western ones.

As for the animated series market, it seems to me that in recent years we have had a noticeable jump in quality. Cartoons are getting better and better and are actively displacing Western and Asian content from the screens that filled television screens a few years ago.

“Masha and the Bear” has captured the Russian market and is beginning to expand to the whole world, but besides it there are many wonderful products: “Fixiki”, “Smeshariki” (I especially liked “Smeshariki: Pin code”), “Barboskiny”, “Papers”, “Mi-Mi-Bears” and our beautiful new “Magic Lantern”. I am sure that the quality of these products is not lower, and possibly higher, than that of many Western series for younger audiences. At the same time, the pace of development is not slowing down, but only accelerating, and I believe that soon our cartoons will be actively exported to foreign markets.

As far as I know, the first project of the brand – a game based on the motive of the series “Arkady Parovozov” – was made by an external studio. Why not internal?

Building your own production takes more time, at least because of the period of hiring people and the formation of work processes. Therefore, despite the fact that internal development is a priority area of development, we decided to give the first project to an external studio.

We did “Arkady Parovozov” together with the PurPurGames studio. We wanted to release the first draft as soon as possible. The guys had both the people and the technological base to launch the development, which allowed us to release the first game as soon as possible.

How is such work generally conducted? For what tasks within the framework of such cooperation is “Interactive Cartoon” responsible, for which third-party developers?

In this case, for our part, we formed the initial concept, controlled the appearance and were responsible for monetization.

Colleagues from PurPurGames wrote a design document and produced content.

The animation studio provided assets from the cartoon, but everything had to be redone and optimized for the capabilities of mobile devices.

At the first stage, a work plan was formulated with a breakdown by mailstones: the studio was able to very clearly plan and predict all the work on time. I mention deadlines so often because when planning a marketing campaign using advertising on television, it is very important to know the exact release date of the product in advance.

By the way, are you interested in finding new teams to develop games based on cartoons? If so, on what terms?

This year, the main focus of our attention is the development of the Interactive Cartoon Studio. We are very actively expanding and hiring new people. First of all, we are looking for people with experience. If you want to create new high-quality children’s products, work with the best cartoon franchises, write to me: aailin@vgtrk.com

We need C# programmers, various 3d graphics specialists, game designers, project managers.

We are also considering the possibilities of cooperation with external studios that have experience in developing high-quality children’s projects. For our part, we are ready to provide brands and fully undertake an advertising campaign using, among other things, television advertising with subsequent profit sharing.

And the last question: can you already boast of the first successes of the brand?

Arkady Parovozov was launched in October 2015. By the time of our conversation (that is, in 2.5 months), the game had already been installed by more than 600,000 people on Android and 250,000 people on iOS in Russia and the CIS. Our first interactive cartoon continues to stay in the top of the Apple App Store and Google Play app stores.

The “Papers” were released at the end of 2015, but have already collected 200,000 installations on Android and 65,000 installations on iOS. In my opinion, this is an excellent result for a pilot children’s project.

Four days after the launch of the “Papers” in the educational games section on the iPad, the game became the absolute leader. And six positions in the TOP (21 in total) were occupied by two of our applications.

Got it! Thanks for the interview!